Posts tagged: Badge Art

Since co-founding the first CONvergence in 1999, I’ve drawn unique, custom badge art for every CONvergence Guest of Honor, every year. It’s time consuming, but I believe—both as a convention runner and as a frequent guest at conventions myself—that it creates a powerful first impression towards CONvergence being a unique convention experience.

I usually try to reference something from a given guest’s body of work in a clever way, as well as try to incorporate our mascot, Connie, on badges for Guests who have been to CONvergence before and are already familiar with the character. Here are the custom Guest of Honor badges I created this year for our CONvergence 2014 Guests.

Amy Berg

One of Amy’s projects is the digital series, Caper, for Geek and Sundry. It seemed appropriate to highlight one of the superheroes from that show, so I drew the armored alter ego of The Machine.

Emma Bull

Emma Bull is probably best known in the Twin Cities for her Minneapolis-based urban fantasy novel, War for the Oaks, so I wanted to visually reference that setting, including the novel’s protagonist, Eddi McCandry, and the shape-shifting phouka.

C Robert Cargill

Cargill is a long-time friend of CONvergence as well as a personal friend of mine. Knowing his tastes, it was a no-brainer to suit him up as Ace Hunter from Megaforce, with Connie along for the ride on his jet-powered, flying motorcycle.

Sarah Clemens

Much of Sarah’s work features the characters of Magnus the cat and Loki the Norwegian Speartail Dragon, so doing something with them seemed the obvious choice. I understood Magnus & Loki are known to be pair of troublemakers, and somehow a “Usual Suspects” motif emerged…

Matthew Ebel

Musician Matt Ebel includes many references to robots, including GLaDOS from Portal. So I placed GLaDOS in front of a keyboard and added Matthew’s trademark beard. This was the design from this year that I most questioned how it would go over, but Matthew was delighted with it. Whew!

Scott Lynch

This was Scott’s first time as a CONvergence Guest of Honor but he’s been attending the convention for many years, so I had no problem casting Connie as the Gray King standing in front of Red Seas Under Red Skies from Scott’s Gentleman Bastard series of novels.

CONvergence 2014 welcomed several Guests of Honor with connections to Disney’s Gargoyles as part of our celebration of the Gargoyles 20th Anniversary. In light of this, I did a mash-up of a Gargoyles character with another thing a given Guest of Honor was known for.

Greg Guler

Greg was Lead Character Designer for Gargoyles and currently serves in the same capacity on Phineas and Ferb, so his badge featured a mash-up of Brooklyn and Phineas and Ferb’s Agent P.

Frank Paur

Frank was the Supervising Producer on Gargoyles and in recent years has served as art director and director of many Marvel animation projects, including Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, so I drew Dr. Bruce Banner transforming into Gargoyles’ Broadway, in an homage to the cover of The Incredible Hulk #1.

Marina Sirtis

Marina Sirtis was the voice of the villainous Demona on Gargoyles, which stood in stark contrast with her role as Counsellor Deanna Troi on Star Trek: The Next Generation. So I couldn’t resist putting Demona in Troi’s uniform… With a phaser rifle thrown in for good measure.

Greg Weisman

I’ve been lucky enough call Greg a colleague and a friend for several years. The majority of our work together was on the Young Justice comic book for DC Comics, so dressing Goliath as Young Justice’s Nightwing seemed oddly appropriate. Whelmed, even.

So that wraps up all of the CONvergence 2014 badge art. If you didn’t see it yet, be sure to check out the CONvergence 2014 membership badge art as well! And if you’re interested in checking out more badge art from previous years, I’ve got most of it posted on my blog under the “Badge Art” tag – click here to check it out!

Each year, CONvergence commissions volunteer art for its Membership Badges that feature our CONvergence mascot, Connie, and references that year’s convention theme. We have different badge art for each of the four different age categories we produce badges for, and inevitably I hear people wishing they’d gotten the artwork on a different age group’s badge.

When I produce the badge art (which almost always, but not always the case), I try to keep the colors bright with a different color scheme for each design so that the small membership badges are as easily identifiable as possible for our volunteer badgers and staff under the various lighting conditions around the convention.

Without further adieu, here were the CONvergence 2014: A Midsummer Night’s Dream Membership Badge Designs!

This was the cover art for the CONvergence 2013 Souvenir Program Guide. Years ago I had drawn the CONvergence mascot Connie as all 10 of the Doctors from Doctor Who. Now as Matt Smith is preparing to leave the show, I still hadn’t had the occasion to add the 11th Doctor to that series. Clearly, this was the time! I arranged Connie as the Eleven Doctors into a clock face around the Seal of Rassilon, with Connie’s creator Professor Max in the #12 position. Will Professor Max be the 12th Doctor? Time will tell…

We had a new system for badges this year, with pre-printed plastic badges in a horizontal format, rather than laminating paper badges designed in a vertical format. The best outcome of this is that the badges now are friendly to the Badge Ribbon tradition popular at Gallifrey Oneand other conventions! Of course, this badge shape creates some interesting challenges for badge art. Here’s what I came up with for CONvergence 2013!

Connie as the Conductor from Thomas the Tank Engine

Connie as Harry Potter

Connie Mark 2 as Number Two from The Prisoner

Professor Max as Rose Tyler, Connie as… apparently SEVERAL of the Doctors, and Connie Mark 2 as a Cyberman

I’m back home from CONvergence 2013, and what a weekend it was. (OK, I was back home a week ago, but since then I’ve been busy catching up on projects and cobbling together photos for this post!)

Without further delay, as promised, here are the CONvergence 2013 Guest of Honour Badges!

Every year I do original badge art for each of the convention’s Guests of Honor. It’s a rather labor-intensive tradition, but it makes a great early impression with guests that their time at CONvergence is going to be something unique and special, and honestly it’s the best icebreaker in the world for me to meet these great people. They almost always flip when they see their badges and are excited to meet the crazy artist who made them!

Here’s Lou Anders shown in the outfit he wore when accepting his Hugo Award. Lou seemed like a great guy and I was sorry I didn’t get more time to chat with him at the con.

I went for her iconic hair and glasses for Charlie Jane Anders‘ badge. At the con her blonde locks had been dyed a spectacular pink. I knew going in there was a good chance I wasn’t going to match her at-con look. Ah, well…

For Caitlin Blackwood‘s badge I went for her iconic moment as Amelia Pond from Doctor Who. I didn’t get much of a chance to talk to Caitlin, but by all accounts she and her mom had a good time!

I’d met Bill Corbett before, even getting to work with him on the Joseph Scrimshaw-produced Super Powered Revenge Christmas #1. While Bill’s ongoing gig these days is Rifftrax, for the sake of a familiar visual I put the silhouette of Crow T. Robot (who Bill voiced after Trace Beaulieu) from MST3K.

Paul Cornell has been good enough to visit CONvergence a number of times before, and rather than reference one of his writing projects again, I thought instead I’d highlight his now-traditional Cricket demo, with CONvergence mascot Connie and her sister robot Connie Mark 2 taking up the game.

I usually avoid using Connie on the badge of first-time Guests of Honor, but referencing the poster for screenwriter James Moran‘s film Severance was too good to pass up.

I hadn’t met Kevin Murphy before, and sadly still really haven’t. We were both in the same room a couple of times, but that’s as good as it got. His badge is a companion piece to Bill Corbettt’s featuring the silhouette of MST3K‘s Tom Servo.

And finally, when I realized that Melinda Snodgrass‘ breakthrough Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Measure of a Man” had introduced the Enterprise crew poker games and that she was one of the major contributors behind George R. R. Martin’s Wildcards series, the mash-up seemed rather obvious!

Here’s THIS YEAR’S Guest of Honor batches, which were handed out to the #CVG2012 Guests of Honor at the hotel last night. I say last night, but I’m pre-scheduling this post on Wednesday, so they don’t have them yet and I’m still hoping they’ll like them! This is the grand finale to several days worth of posts sharing the art I’ve done for badges for the past several years of CONvergence.

#CVG2012 – Bonnie Burton

#CVG2012 – Jennifer Clarke Wilkes

#CVG2012 – Judith Walcutt

Author Bonnie Burton is a fan of Star Wars and Bettie Page, so there you go.

Jennifer Clarke Wilkes is an editor, notably of the book The Last Supper. So you can see what I did with a parody of that book’s cover. I hope she finds this joke funny.

Among her other credits, Judith Walcutt was Executive Producer of the The War of the Worlds 50th Anniversary Production.

#CVG2012 – Lyda Morehouse

#CVG2012 – Ruth Thompson

#CVG2012 – Sharyn November

Author Lyda Morehouse’s badge is a reference to her writer’s group the Wyrdsmiths.

Ruth Thompson’s badge is a Connie-fication of Ruth’s print Eye of the Storm.

Sharyn November is the author of the Firebirds series, including the award winning Firebirds Rising.

#CVG2012 – Sophie Aldred

#CVG2012 – Tamora Pierce

I love Sophie Aldred as Ace from Doctor Who, and this was the badge I had wanted to do for her since I first learned she was coming to CONvergence as a guest.

And finally Tamora Pierce’s badge is a reference to her Songs of the Lioness series.

So these guests are walking around the Double Tree hotel in Bloomington, Minnesota wearing these badges. Hopefully they like them.

Once again, watch for all the CONvergence-related tweets at #CVG2012. I hope to see many of you there! Look me up at one of my signings or panels!